Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Querying Wikidata

For my own use more than anything else I've started creating a list of Wikidata SPARQL queries here. I personally don't find Wikidata's data model particularly easy to grasp, so one way to learn is to take the example queries on the Wikidata Query site and mess about with them.

It is also fairly straightforward to search for content by identifier, e.g.

SELECT *
WHERE
{
?work wdt:P356 "10.2476/ASJAA.62.33" .
}

will find the article with the DOI 10.2476/ASJAA.62.33. One minor gotcha is that Wikidata has all DOIs in UPPERCASE, so you either need to sera for uppercase version of the DOI, or use a filter to convert the case, which is slow.

As I come across interesting or useful queries I'll add them to the list in GitHub.